Comedy for Dummies

CLOSEMOUTHED Jeff Dunham and company outside his home in Encino, Calif.Credit
Dewey Nicks for The New York Times

The Umpire was built in 1941 by George and Glenn McElroy, the Ohio brothers considered to be the Stradivariuses of ventriloquist dummies. The figure stands six feet tall and was meant to work the plate at a girls’ softball game. (Remote-controlled sewing-machine motors raise each arm to call balls and strikes.) But the Umpire never ended up being used. He’d been packed in plastic in a garage and then a basement for five decades — chipped in places and blighted by mold — by the time the stand-up comedian and ventriloquist Jeff Dunham got him last spring. Dunham, who builds the dummies he uses and restores antique ones as a hobby, went to work.

He was finishing the job one night last July, gluing on a new, male-patterned ring of hair and comically bushy eyebrows. Dunham is 47, with feathery brown hair and a habit of curling his mouth into an overbite when he finds something hilarious. He beams with regular-guyness. Recently, Forbes listed him as the third-highest-earning comedian in America, after Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock, both of whom make their piles largely on television syndication and film royalties. Dunham has neither; his first series, “The Jeff Dunham Show,” had its premiere on Comedy Central on Oct. 22. Instead, he has toured relentlessly for 25 years. In the past year, he has played 150 shows and grossed $38 million in ticket sales, far more than any other comic.

Last November, Dunham separated from his wife of 14 years, with whom he has raised three daughters. His new girlfriend, Audrey Murdick, who is 29 and also his nutritionist, was helping with the Umpire, handing Dunham swatches of eyebrow. He was matching his work to a photo on his MacBook. It showed the McElroys standing with the just-completed Umpire in their workshop. It’s a famous photo; later, when I met some of Dunham’s ventriloquist friends, they knew what time the clock in the background showed. As a boy, Dunham saw the picture in a ventriloquism museum every summer, while attending a ventriloquist convention in Kentucky. “I’d think, Man, I want to see him,” he told me, smoothing down the Umpire’s lapels. “The fact that I’m standing here fixing him up is too wacky.”

It was wacky. Especially because we were in the back of Dunham’s mammoth black tour bus, outside the Prairie Capital Convention Center, an arena in Springfield, Ill., where he had just performed for a sold-out crowd of 7,000 as part of his summer tour. For close to two hours, Dunham had loosed a big stew of jokes, ranging from goofy to racist and homophobic, but which — delivered by puppets, with Dunham making disapproving faces — managed to feel almost wholesome, and even a little square. An exchange with Walter, Dunham’s crotchety-old-man character, went like this:

It was followed by a story about making a sex tape. Peanut, a hyperactive purple Muppetish dummy, kicked off his portion of the show just by saying different words for breasts — “bodacious ta-tas” got the biggest laugh — and closed with a bit about ordering Chinese food, done in a preposterous Fu Manchu accent. By the encore, when Dunham brought out his redneck character to do a routine from his first DVD, all 7,000 people in the arena were ecstatically chanting the dummy’s punch lines together — a choir of thrown voices. (Dunham: “Do you have a drinking problem?” Everyone: “No! I’ve pretty much got it figured out!”) Then, when it was over — after Dunham fired some balled-up Jeff Dunham T-shirts into the upper decks with the kind of air-powered bazooka you see during N.B.A. halftimes — he literally ran out the arena’s back door and onto his bus, where he went back to work on the Umpire.

“This is so scary for me,” he said, applying a critical bit of glue to the right temple. Outside, fans had ringed the front of the tour bus. You could hear them whenever the door opened. They were chanting: “Jeff! Jeff! Jeff!”

MAYBE YOU HAVEN’T heard of Jeff Dunham. It hardly matters. For decades, when he played comedy clubs and small theaters, his most loyal audiences were in middle America. But he has recently achieved a surreal, ventriloquial megacelebrity and has had no problem finding enough Jeff Dunham fans to pack an arena wherever he goes: Fairbanks, Missoula, Newark. In New Hampshire and in Illinois recently, he sold out 10,000-seat arenas twice in the same day — afternoon and evening shows. At one venue, the manager ran out of chairs and had to rent fancy white ones from a wedding supplier.

Dunham’s three concert DVDs, which all originated as specials on Comedy Central, have together sold upward of five million copies. One, “Spark of Insanity,” had the highest average customer rating of any DVD on Amazon last year. And a clip from it — a shtick with a skeleton in a turban named Achmed the Dead Terrorist — is currently the ninth-most-watched video of all time on YouTube. Achmed is an adorably pitiful jihadist who rattles off Vaudevillian zingers about the 72 virgins he was promised, stinky flatulence and Lindsay Lohan, shooting his stunned eyes in all directions like a first grader in a school play wondering if he hit his cue. “I am a horrible suicide bomber,” he admits to Dunham at one point. “I had a premature detonation.” The clip has been viewed almost 100 million times and has made Dunham a star overseas. The comedian Bill Engvall, who came up playing clubs in Dallas at the same time as Dunham, calls the Achmed character “a genius marketing move” and framed the video’s impact this way: “How many times a day is the word ‘terrorist’ Googled? But that thing still pops up there near the top of the list.” (It’s usually in the Top 5.) Looking at all of these numbers — and you get the sense that Dunham’s people love numbers and have binders full of them — you could argue that Dunham is the most successful comedian working in America. That fact is more impressive given the prevailing, lackluster view of ventriloquism.

Another data point: Dunham’s live audiences spend $8 per head on merchandise, which is more than most rock bands average; his merchandise has drawn $7 million so far this year. (Soon a full line of Jeff Dunham apparel, including Achmed pajamas, will hit retail. A Washington State winery already sells an award-winning Achmed the Dead Terrorist syrah.) Not surprisingly then, literally within seconds of the arena doors’ opening, the merchandise booth at the Prairie Capital was mobbed. I managed to recognize someone in the scrum: Quin Vahldick, whom I chatted with outside while he and his wife sucked down preshow Marlboros. Vahldick, a mustachioed automotive instructor in his 50s, was about to drop $100 on two plush dolls. He couldn’t help himself. “Peanut’s a stitch,” he told me. “Absolutely a stitch.” Lined up behind him, a pudgy girl of about 10 shouted: “Oh, I want Walter! Can I have Walter?” I met a couple in their 70s who were at their first comedy show, then turned around and immediately met another in their late teens who’d driven six and a half hours from Memphis. Even Vahldick’s mother was a Dunham fanatic, he told me. “She’s 84 years old.”

For weeks, Dunham’s handlers had been stressing to me how “multigenerational” his audience is. They were so relentlessly on-message about it that I assumed they were exaggerating — until I saw it for myself. It was an odd kind of diversity: the crowd at the Prairie Capital was almost entirely white, but other than that, I was hard pressed to find a phrase to describe even a majority. Maybe “not thin.”

“One of the great things about Jeff is that he’s a big tent,” David Bernath, Comedy Central’s senior vice president of programming, told me. “That’s what makes his audience-garnering ability a precious thing.” Bernath acknowledged that Dunham and his new series are conspicuously “broader and ‘cleaner,’ if you will, to use the advertiser-friendly term, than a lot of the stuff we’re known for” — edgier comics like Dave Chappelle; wry hipsters like Sarah Silverman; or satirists like Stephen Colbert. “But as a network,” Bernath told me, “you’ve just got to roll with it.” There’s no ignoring the numbers. Last winter, Dunham’s “Very Special Christmas Special” drew 6.6 million viewers, almost three times as many as Stephen Colbert’s Christmas special. It was the most-watched telecast in Comedy Central’s history.

DUNHAM GREW UP in an affluent neighborhood of Dallas, the adopted son and only child of a real estate appraiser and a homemaker. When he was 8, his parents gave him for Christmas a Mortimer Snerd dummy, the bumpkin character used by the legendary ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. The next day, Dunham’s dad took him to the Dallas Public Library’s bookmobile to check out a how-to book, and Dunham started practicing long hours in front of a mirror, transcribing Bergen’s routines to study them.

Bergen almost single-handedly carried ventriloquism safely out of Vaudeville as the little theaters went dark in the 30s. He appeared in films but became a household name in an unnatural medium for a ventriloquist: radio. His weekly show aired for almost 20 years, until 1956. By that time, the art was also thriving on television, where ventriloquism was embraced as a low-cost special effect. Ventriloquists like Jimmy Nelson would switch voices rapidly while operating multiple characters. (Nelson’s motto for dealing with a tough crowd was “If you can’t amuse them, then amaze them.”) But as more animation found its way onto the air, and with the advent of actual special effects in shows like “Bewitched” and “I Dream of Jeannie,” ventriloquism started looking quaint and not especially amazing anymore. Bergen made regular TV appearances until he died — he hosted “The Muppet Show” in 1977, the same year Jay Johnson brought ventriloquism back to prime time, briefly, on the show “Soap.” But even by 1969, when Dunham got his doll, the art was floundering somewhere not too far from total irrelevance.

Dunham trotted out his dummy for whoever would hire him, or at least tolerate it: doing an oral book report on Hansel and Gretel in third grade or retelling bible stories at church; performing at Six Flags as a summer job, or at fund-raisers for the Christian summer camp his mom sent him to. In high school, he did commercials for a Datsun dealership and each year posed for his yearbook photo with one of his dummies. He and a dummy named Archie Everett also co-wrote a column for the school paper.

Photo

Dunham with Achmed the Dead Terrorist.Credit
Dewey Nicks for The New York Times

“You’d think that in high school, people would have made fun of me for doing this,” he told me. “But I guess it became — I’m not going to say ‘cool’ — but it became O.K. Because I was saying things that they could never get away with.” He quickly realized that a dummy could crack jokes and level insults that he was too shy to touch. So he made fun of his teachers. Also the lunch lady. Playing banquets as a middle-schooler, he lampooned prominent Dallas-area businessmen in the audience, including the Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach. “For some reason, a 12- or 13-year-old kid with a dummy making fun of a superstar like that was some kind of magical formula,” Dunham told me. In college, he flew to do performances around the country on weekends. At an in-house gig for General Electric, he mocked Jack Welch.

By the mid-90s, after moving to Los Angeles, Dunham was appearing on late-night television and headlining the Improv chain of comedy clubs. “In those days, he’d just started doing the old-man puppet, and he would knock ’em dead every night,” Steve Schirripa, who used to book Dunham at the Improv in Las Vegas, told me. Schirripa, best known for playing Bobby Baccalieri on “The Sopranos,” said it wasn’t surprising that when Dunham was finally given a shot on Comedy Central, he pulled monstrous ratings. Rooms in Vegas are microcosms of national television audiences — people from all over the country, looking to be entertained in a relatively unchallenging way. “Some stand-ups from New York or L.A. die a thousand deaths in Vegas,” Schirripa said. “They’re alternative, they’re artists. They’re too hip for the room.” Dunham, on the other hand, “didn’t even look like he was an entertainer. He looked like a regular guy, like he could work the front desk at one of the hotels or manage the coffee shop. It was a clean act with a puppet.”

Dunham has been performing since an age before most people truly develop their own sense of humor, and his tastes seem to have evolved with his audiences’. He told me: “Growing up doing those Kiwanis Clubs, doing those Cub Scout banquets, doing those church shows, I learned to find that sensibility that most people could laugh at — that all ages and demographics could laugh at.” (Minutes into his first DVD, he manages to make fun of both Prius drivers for being fruity and Hummer drivers for being meatheads.) His motivation now is still astoundingly childlike: to make the most people possible laugh, so that he’ll get to do his act again. “It’s a survival thing,” he said. “I don’t do anything to be artistic, or just because I like it.” He’s become a genuine connoisseur of the big, goofy laugh and confessed to me that there are still times Peanut’s Chinese routine makes him break character and lose it a little onstage.

One afternoon I watched Dunham work with the new writing team for “The Jeff Dunham Show.” After a full day of shooting, they were gathered in Dunham’s trailer outside a studio in Burbank to hash out the script for the following day. Anticipating high ratings, Comedy Central had moved the premiere up by three months, forcing them to work quickly in the days between his tour dates. On top of that, Dunham was buying a new house this summer, negotiating the end of his marriage and trying hard to maintain at least a semi-normal relationship with his three daughters, ages 18, 14 and 12, which involved sending and receiving a phenomenal number of text messages.

“This is kind of an abbreviated version, but the beats are all there — the journey is there,” said Ross McCall, one of the show’s producers, as he handed around a script. The sketch was built around a cameo by Brooke Hogan, the 21-year-old reality-TV star best known for being Hulk Hogan’s daughter. Hogan would go on a date with Peanut, Dunham’s purple puppet.

Everyone read to himself. Dunham didn’t like one of Peanut’s first jokes, about how another reality-TV star, Kim Kardashian, would pass gas on a baby if it meant getting some publicity. “We’ve got to get away from the poop jokes,” he said.

McCall spoke up: “It’s not really a poop joke.” He was making a sincere, semantic point, but not too assertively. Dunham didn’t answer directly; he told a long story about an audition he did in the 90s. Eventually he said: “Just come up with something different about Kim Kardashian, that’s all. Something about her butt or her boobs.”

Throughout the meeting, Dunham functioned as a one-man focus group — standing up for the sensibilities of a tween, an 18-to-24-year-old male and a hockey mom simultaneously. He cut a reference to Skype (“I think more people know what iChatting is than freakin’ Skype,” he said) and also a joke about Zooey Deschanel, because she was too niche of an actress (“The tiny one?” he asked, trying to place her). When the idea came up of Peanut’s choking violently on a tortilla chip and ruining his date with Hogan, Dunham interjected. “It should be an allergic reaction. Choking is frightening.”

He spent a great deal of time safeguarding the integrity of his characters — “Peanut’s not going to ask her to freakin’ marry him right away! He just met her!” — and also swatting away jokes that felt too scatological or easy. “Again?” he said at one point, hitting a joke about pornography in another sketch. The scripts had too many porn jokes in them. Also condom jokes. For a time, Dunham just sat there, picking lint off his laptop — not in a passive-aggressive way; he just couldn’t hide his discouragement. “This show’s gotta have some art to it,” he said.

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He was trying to train the writers to see what he sees: a kind of mindlessness that’s not totally idiotic. But they couldn’t yet, and maybe understandably: there are porn and poop jokes all over Dunham’s DVDs.

LOTS OF PEOPLE don’t find Jeff Dunham funny. As hard as he works to find a universal funny bone, there are clearly some Americans he is resigned to losing, or even brutally alienating. Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe you don’t think Walter’s telling Dunham, “You’re from Planet Retard,” is as hilarious as the audience in Springfield did. Maybe you don’t love it when the dummies call Dunham “gay,” which they do a lot. Maybe it’s offensive to you. Maybe you’re just bored.

Gradually, a lot of Dunham’s material has come to reflect his exhaustion with political correctness — though he needles taboos in the same impish way that his dummies used to cut down untouchables like the lunch lady or Jack Welch when he was a kid. Unlike the acts of some other comedians with a big red-state following, Dunham’s doesn’t feel resentful or vindictive, and he’s not eager to brand himself ideologically. His outlook struck me as almost alarmingly uncomplicated. He defends himself by noting that he tries to insult all races and ethnicities equally, and ultimately seems to treat jokes about all Indians being customer-service operators or all black people drinking malt liquor not all that differently from jokes involving other well-worn comedic tropes — like all wives being annoying nags or Florida being way too humid.

Dunham does concede that he’s extra-sensitive to one of his largest constituencies: the conservative “country crowd.” “That’s why I don’t pick on basic Christian-values stuff,” he told me. “Well, I also don’t like to, because that’s the way I was brought up.” He then stopped himself short and said: “Oh, boy. I’m walking into something here.”

Dunham started to explain — as if realizing it for the first time — that this would appear to make the jokes he does about Islam with Achmed “hypocritical.” But he quickly unburdened himself of the idea. “I try to make the majority of my audience laugh,” he said. “That’s my audience. They’ll laugh at the dead terrorist.”

In fact, the jokes that get some of the wildest, loudest reactions aren’t really even jokes, just statements. Like when one puppet shouts that all Mexicans should learn English, or when Dunham wishes Walter “Happy Holidays” and Walter responds: “I’ve been wanting to say this for a couple of years now: Screw you, it’s ‘Merry Christmas’!” And the crowd doesn’t laugh; it riotously applauds. Dunham describes them as moments of “catharsis,” when the dummy says something “everyone wants to laugh about, or that you snicker at with one or two friends, but that you could never say out loud.”

But some people don’t quietly burn to say these things out loud and will not, consequently, rise from their seats with cathartic glee when a puppet does. Unfortunately for Dunham, those kinds of people have traditionally included entertainment-industry power brokers living in New York or Los Angeles. J. P. Williams is the Hollywood producer behind the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, which first demonstrated that there was an overlooked and hugely profitable audience for comedy in Middle America, and even he told me he doesn’t think Dunham’s act is that funny. “His material is pretty soft,” Williams said. “If you take away the puppets and close your eyes, there’s not really that many jokes there. He’s not a comic. He’s a ventriloquist. He’s got a great gift, and his gift is that he makes stuff talk and he keeps his mouth pretty much closed when he does it.” Dunham has had similar trouble with critics. In July, he performed for television critics at an industry showcase to promote the Comedy Central series and was heckled — viciously. “You suck!” one man actually yelled out. He wasn’t just a television critic; he was French.

For years, Comedy Central resisted investing in Dunham, even after he made a successful appearance on the channel in 2003. A ventriloquist clashed with the network’s image of itself as hip and provocative. “It wasn’t that slick Comedy Central stuff,” Dunham told me. He’d been playing comedy clubs for two decades, and though he was still pulling in upward of $600,000 a year, he worried that his career had lost its momentum. He fixated on getting a TV show. “I thought, How in the world am I going to get to that place that Ray Romano got to, you know?” he told me. He’d just turned 40 and, for the first time since he was 8, questioned whether it was feasible to become a superstar ventriloquist in America.

Dunham’s manager, Judi Brown-Marmel, lobbied Comedy Central for a one-hour special. She unfurled all her fabulous numbers: his drawing power at the clubs, his merchandising profits. (Already fans were buying a line of Peanut dolls Dunham had contracted a Chinese manufacturer to produce.) It all showed the loyal and lucrative audience Dunham would bring to the table. But Comedy Central was unmoved. Finally, Brown-Marmel remembers, “I said to them, ‘Your problem is that you think that all anybody wants to see on your network is, you know, the young kid with the flippy hair and the attitude.’ ”

Comedy Central soon started reconsidering its brand. In 2003, it broadcast the first concert movie by the Blue Collar Comics: Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, Ron White and Larry the Cable Guy. The film got better ratings than any other in the network’s history. The network’s president admitted this success “totally blindsided” him, and its effect seems to have been to slacken Comedy Central’s commitment to a single aesthetic and make its programming more of a meritocracy — which, when it comes to something as subjective as what’s funny, is basically a profit-ocracy. A numbers game.

Dunham’s first special was shown on the channel in 2006 and drew two million viewers. “Literally, that’s the reason I got there,” he told me equably. “It’s whatever’s selling.”

THE AFTERNOON AFTER the Springfield gig, Dunham’s tour bus was parked, as discreetly as such a thing could be, behind the Drawbridge Inn in Fort Mitchell, Ky. (His driver had driven all night to meet Dunham, who had flown in on a chartered jet.)

The Drawbridge is a sprawling medieval-themed complex in some disrepair. The squalid moat surrounding one building is lidded with moss. For 33 years, the Drawbridge has hosted the Vent Haven ConVENTion, an international gathering of ventriloquists. This year, 425 “vents” from nine countries were attending, including, I was told, “the most famous ventriloquist in South Korea.”

Dunham came to the inaugural ConVENTion when he was in sixth grade and has missed only one since — in 1977, when he went to Europe with his church’s choir. (He was an accompanist, on trombone.) After a few summers, the organizers were forced to declare Dunham a “retired champion,” ineligible from entering any more competitions; other attendees were scared to go up against him. He now has his own section, alongside Señor Wences and his idol, Edgar Bergen, in the hall-of-fame building of the Vent Haven Museum, a historical collection on a residential street near the hotel. “He’s a rock star now,” his friend Tom Ladshaw, a ventriloquist and magician, told me. “It’s stunning for us, coming from our world. But in a lot of ways, he’s still the same kid he was when I was 18 and he was 16 and we were coming here. You can see it in his face.”

Dunham came bounding out of his bus. He’d offered to shuttle a half-dozen of the convention’s V.I.P.’s, all of them his friends, to the museum for their annual look around. He hugged Jimmy Nelson, a white-haired man of 80, and his wife, and introduced them to Audrey Murdick, who was with him at the ConVENTion for the first time. Nelson, an icon of the art, is best known for the Nestle’s Quik commercials he did with his dummies, Danny O’Day and Farfel, in the 50s and 60s. He also recorded a seminal how-to record, “Jimmy Nelson’s Instant Ventriloquism,” which Dunham listened to compulsively as a child and still recommends. The first summer Dunham came to Vent Haven, his mother forced him to go up to Nelson at the hotel pool and introduce himself. Now, Nelson told me about Dunham, “he’s probably done more for ventriloquism than anyone since Edgar Bergen.” He added, “This is where Jeff got his start, and it’s wonderful that he hasn’t forgotten this place.”

By the standards of contemporary stand-up, Dunham can come off as a throwback. But by the standards of ventriloquism, which has been stunted artistically for decades, he is the avant-garde — technically innovative, hip, potty-mouthed and fearless.

“It took somebody to break the mold,” the ConVENTion’s executive director, Mark Wade, told me. For generations, ventriloquists were tied to using cheeky little-boy puppets, modeled on Edgar Bergen’s dummy, Charlie McCarthy. Dunham had been trying to push beyond that since college — experimenting with more imaginative, almost surreal characters. (For a while, he did his act with a talking orange Tic-Tac: he held up a full box of Tic-Tacs and carried on a conversation with a particular one somewhere near the bottom.) Achmed the Dead Terrorist took him into more risky, topical territory. New kinds of characters, Wade argued, enable new attitudes and more relevant styles of comedy.

Like nearly everyone I met at the ConVENTion, Wade tried to convince me that Dunham — both by inspiring other vents and as an ambassador to pop and youth cultures — was leading a renaissance for the art, a return to mainstream prominence in America and maybe even coolness. Ventriloquism is finally transcending its stereotypes, Wade told me. “Jeff’s helping us all take that step forward, opening up these new vistas,” he said, adding: “I don’t even use a boy puppet in my show now. I’ve got a bird. I’ve got a talking horse.”

But while everyone at Vent Haven claimed Dunham as a transformative hope for ventriloquism, his people in Los Angeles try to distance him from it. When first arriving on the set of “The Jeff Dunham Show,” I asked a makeup artist something about the “dummies.” She leaned in and mercifully whispered, “They’re not dummies, they’re characters,” helping me get my terminology straight before I went off and said “dummies” to someone higher up in the organization. Brown-Marmel told me that in her 11 years of managing Dunham, she has never used the word “ventriloquist.”

I was beginning to pick up on the strange poign­ancy of life as Earth’s most famous ventriloquist. At the ConVENTion, Dunham traveled to and from his tour bus via back staircases and freight entrances. He walked around the exterior of buildings to avoid the lobby. He showed up at performances a split second before they began. He didn’t want to overshadow anyone, or be constantly bombarded, but he was so irrepressibly polite that he was groping for a way to do it without any air of celebrity jerkness. There were moments when I felt sorry for him: Vent Haven, after all, was the one place most ventriloquists got to feel part of a community — and where he had felt at home since childhood. And what would happen next year, after “The Jeff Dunham Show” was broadcast, once acres of Achmed pajamas hung in America’s big-box stores? Already, during one of the convention’s featured performances — while Dunham and Murdick sat unassumingly in the last row, near the door — the ventriloquist onstage did a bit in which his dummy harangued him for envying Dunham: Dunham’s screaming arena crowds, Dunham’s expensive cars, Dunham’s hot girlfriend. “I’m not jealous; I’ve got my own style,” the vent told his dummy, but a little too vulnerably. Few people laughed; it felt as if something unsettlingly psychotherapeutic was being hashed out.

Dunham’s only official role at this year’s convention was to deliver a lecture on the last afternoon. It was titled “The Art of Creativity.” He planned to close by unveiling the refurbished Umpire.

Conventioneers flooded into the Drawbridge’s ballroom all at once. I saw a 15-year-old make for the front row the way children hustle around swimming pools — arms pumping, running without exactly running. Then a lanky woman in her 70s sped into view and overtook him. After a short introduction, Mark Wade called for some special music to be played while Dunham took the stage. Dunham stood there for a moment, cocking his head. The melody was hard to make out over the applause. “Very funny,” he finally said. “Handel’s ‘Messiah.’ ”

Jon Mooallem, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about the self-storage industry.

A version of this article appears in print on November 1, 2009, on Page MM38 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Comedy for Dummies. Today's Paper|Subscribe